Des Pots et des Bouteilles

"Benanteur's painting, renewed year after year by his growing knowledge of museums, and freed of the parallel experience of engraving, little by little gave up the discipline of stripping down, and gave itself up wholeheartedly, finding a new landscape, not a stranger to the previous one, like another side to his quest, where he attained a certain form of beatitude, a kind of heavenly garden reconstituting by combining them, the thousand and one mornings of the world. An enchanted earth, no longer altered but bathed by the rising and setting sunlight.

Among the contemporary painters of the Maghreb, Abdallah Benanteur occupies a singular and exemplary place from an international point of view, through his legitimate and radical refusal of any form of academism, be it figurative, abstract, or post-modern, as well as any folkloric arrangements which would betray the authentic Arabic-Islamic tradition, which invariably ends up within a reductive and normalising impoverishment of genuine popular creativity. On the other hand, he called upon painting, to endow it with a gesture taken from calligraphic principles, and which he always maintained concise, dense, imperiously rhythmic, never tempted to let itself be enclosed or subjected to the sign ... Its only aim being to awaken in each of us the celebration of the imaginary."

(Raoul-Jean Moulin, in Claude Lemand (ed.) Benanteur volume 1. Paintings,, Paris, 2002, pp. 18-19)